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5 Golf Games You Should Be Playing to Improve Your Skills

Golf drills are one of the best ways to make your practice time more effective, and build real skills that you can bring out to the course. Most golfers fall victim to what I call “zombie range sessions” where they end up in a pattern of hitting the same shots over and over again. They are not learning, challenging themselves, or doing much to improve their games. Don’t become a golf zombie!

A quality set of golf drills can fix this problem, and get you focused. This is exactly why we built a library of content for our Insider Members. We have performance games, video lessons, and much more from some of the top instructors in the game.

Here are five golf drills I highly recommend for a golfer of any level:

Impact Location Challenge

Where you are striking the ball on the face of your irons and driver is crucially important to your success on the course. The problem is that most golfers have no idea where their impact tendencies are, and have never tried to fix them.

For this drill you will need a dry eraser pen and Dr. Scholls Odor X spray. For your irons you will simply make a small mark on the back of your ball with a dry-eraser pen, and your impact location will show up on the face of your iron. If you’re hitting your driver, spray the face with Dr. Scholls.

Your first goal is to establish if you have any kind of tendencies. Are you striking it more towards the heel of the face, or the toe?

Next comes the fun part, and a real skill-building exercise. Try to strike various parts of the face of the club on purpose. With your irons try to get it closer to the heel or the toe, and then go for the sweet spot. With your driver you can do the same thing, and even try to hit the ball lower or higher on the face. This is one of the best golf drills out there, and you will be surprised how much you can learn about your swing.

Shot Shaper

Hank Haney spoke a lot about his work with Tiger Woods in his tell-all book. One of the main golf drills he would have Tiger do is to perform all of the “9 shots.” Essentially it’s a variation of each shot shape with a different trajectory. So you take low, mid, high and mix it with draw, straight, fade.

This is a bit advanced for most golfers, and it’s much easier to just experiment with a few and have fun. One way to do it is to take the complete opposite of your normal trajectory. If you usually hit a high fade, try hitting a low hook. This is a great skill-building exercise that will allow you to understand how to manipulate the club in order to change your shot. Additionally, all of those shots will come in handy on the course because as you know, a round of golf will throw many challenges at you!

Par 18

This is probably the best short-game challenge you can do. It is used by touring professionals, college players, and some of the best teachers out there. Why? Because it will absolutely improve your short game!

Par 18 is quite simple. You choose 9 spots around a practice green. Your goal is to get up and down from each location. Keep playing this game and track your scores every week.

Thread the Needle

This is a great putting drill that will put some pressure on you and help with your speed control. Pick a distance closer to the hole; you can start at around 10 feet.

Your goal on the first putt is to get it past the hole. The next putt should finish short of the hole. The last putt needs to land between your first two putts. If you can successfully accomplish that, then you can move farther away. If you miss, start all over again!

Tee Shot Test

This is a fun little game you can play on the range to help improve your tee-shot accuracy. You are going to build an imaginary fairway that is about 30 yards wide on the practice range. You can start off by hitting 10 shots.

For each shot that lands in the fairway you give yourself the following score: 1 point for an iron, 2 points for a hybrid/fairway wood, and 3 points for a driver.

This will force you to use a little bit of strategy to see what score you can achieve. More importantly you will have real pressure on each shot.

Do You Want More Golf Drills?

We have an extensive library of HD video swing drills, practice games, and much more for our Practical Golf Insider members. Find out all of the benefits of membership here.

About the Author

Jon Sherman is the owner of Practical Golf, a website dedicated to being an honest resource for the everyday golfer who is looking to enjoy the game more, as well as improve. He is the author of the bestselling book 101 Mistakes All Golfers Make (and how to fix them). You can find him on Twitter here - @practicalgolf, where he is happy to chat about golf with anyone.

I like what you said about the impact location challenge and how you strike various parts of the face of the club to improve control. I think that golfing is more difficult than people think, and it’s a great idea to consider professional golf lessons or camps. My son is super passionate about sports, and he wants to take up golf, so we’re going to find the best junior golf camp available to help him with his skills.

Par 18, or Par 36 sometimes, is a great game. I’ll often break it up onto thirds and force myself to chip with my gap, sand and lob wedge for one third each. It can be a real challenge to hit the gap wedge and the lob wedge the same distances. The added familiarity with chipping and pitching comes in very handy on the course. And the foot spray has been in my bag for two years. It always gets comments. I’ve learned so much about my overall tendencies and also my tendencies with different clubs. I’ve heard you should have one golf swing for all your clubs my whole life, and I never really bought that, and the foot spray evidence gave me the freedom to explore that my swings vary a little bit and the confidence to believe it and execute it. Down from a 22 index to 10.9 in the last three year at 46. Oh, and buy the Orange Whip. Best money I’ve ever spent.